All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
The London election results have finally been declared and it turns out the poll were not lying: Laurence Fox is not to be the capital’s mayor. The onetime actor lost his £10,000 deposit last night after managing just 47,364 votes or, as he preferred to call it, ‘a football stadium’s worth of voters.’ This was
It’s not just the Labour party which is institutionally incapable of understanding why the Conservative party kicked the hell out of them in these elections. It is also, of course, the BBC. The prime offender was — hold your breath in surprise — Emily Maitlis on Newsnight. Furlough and vaccines were the sole reason the
Professor Neil Ferguson struck an unusually optimistic tone this week. With just one Covid death reported on Monday, and infection levels at an eight-month low in the UK, the architect of the original lockdown said: ‘The data is very encouraging and very much in line with what we expected.’ The first half of that statement
Who does a capital city belong to? In the case of London tonight, one answer could be ‘Labour’, now that Sadiq Khan has claimed victory, as the party performs disastrously elsewhere. And clearly Khan’s strong support among the left-wing, the middle class, EU nationals (who are permitted to vote for the mayoralty), and some of
The Unionist tactical voting in Scotland makes it tempting to see the country as split down the middle between pro-independence and anti-independence voters. But this is not quite right. There is a good argument that the Scottish electorate is actually split three ways between Unionists, Nationalists and those who aren’t fully decided on the constitutional
As the dust settles from Scotland’s elections and the war of words heats up over a future referendum, one thing is perfectly clear: Alex Salmond’s Alba party has been a monumental failure. The former First Minister, whose disastrous party launch six weeks ago set the tone for what followed, failed to be elected as one
The local election results are not over yet but the recriminations in Labour over the party’s bad results are already well under way. Following the party’s loss in Hartlepool as well as losses in various red wall councils, Keir Starmer has started to rearrange his top team. This afternoon the Labour leader made the bold decision to sack
As Keir Starmer spends the weekend working out how exactly to bounce back from disappointing results for his party in the local elections, not every Labour politician is down and out. Step forward Andy Burnham. The Greater Manchester mayor has this afternoon been re-elected with an impressive 67.3 per cent of the vote. In his victory
Andy Street won the West Midlands mayoralty in 2017 by the slimmest of margins, with 50.4 percent of the vote to Labour’s 49.6 percent in the second round. He has been re-elected by a far more comfortable margin: 54 percent in the second round, and was within eight thousand votes of winning on the first
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Scotland will have a pro-independence majority at Holyrood, but the SNP has fallen short of an overall majority. What does this mean for the party, its leader Nicola Sturgeon, and the campaign for a second independence referendum? Katy Balls speaks to James Forsyth and Stephen Daisley. James Forsyth: ‘In a way, this is why this
After the news of a Tory landslide in Hartlepool was announced early Friday morning, senior Welsh Labour figures were worried. The scale of defeat in the North of England was worse than expected, and represented nothing short of a disaster for Keir Starmer’s leadership. Could the same fate be expected for Labour’s Red Wall in
‘We’re trapped between the two worlds,’ said a Labour worker during the last days of the party’s ill-fated Hartlepool by-election campaign. She meant Labour was strapped for cash, lacking the many small donations that came with Jeremy Corbyn and the big donors who backed Tony Blair. Her comment, however, had a wider relevance. In trying
Sir Keir Starmer is planning a policy review as part of his plans to ‘change’ Labour after the dismal Super Thursday results. This sounds, to put it mildly, like a rather small response to a rather big problem. Talking to MPs and campaigners over the past 24 hours, I have noticed a shift in the
The election of a Conservative MP in Hartlepool for the first time in the constituency’s modern history is yet another wake-up call for my party. Peter Mandelson once enjoyed a 17,500 majority here. Now the Tories are deep into what was once safe Labour territory – the industrial heartlands of the North – with a
Education has become embroiled in a culture war and rather than extricating itself politely, it just keeps digging. What gets taught has long been subject to debate: move beyond the basics and you rapidly head into dangerous terrain (although, look hard enough, and you will find those prepared to argue that even maths and spelling
International travel is back on the menu, in theory. From 17 May the ‘stay in the UK’ restrictions are lifting and residents can legally leave the country once again. But the number of destinations where you won’t have to quarantine on return is limited, and travelling anywhere will require jumping through several hoops. At today’s No. 10
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They saved her once, but it seems that the Congressional Republicans patience with Representative Liz Cheney has run out. The founder of the GOP said ‘a house divided cannot stand’, but maybe it’s not a divided as the media makes it out. Freddy Gray speaks to Grace Curley, host of The Grace Curley Show.
Sir Keir Starmer has just accepted that Labour needs to ‘change’ and ‘reconnect’ with voters, following the Hartlepool by-election result. In a rather stressed and evasive TV interview, the Labour leader repeatedly said his party needed to change, but refused to say whether there would be a reshuffle, or indeed what the party’s message would
Having claimed earlier in the week that would he take ‘full responsibility’ for Labour’s election results, it took until 4 p.m. for Keir Starmer to emerge and face the media on what went wrong in Hartlepool. In contrast to a jovial Johnson who got to do his piece to camera in front of a twenty
As local election results pour in across the country, it’s the Tees Valley count that is making waves. Ben Houchen has been re-elected as Tees Valley mayor with 73 per cent of the vote. To put things into perspective, Houchen won 39.5 per cent of the vote in 2017. His re-election had been priced in after the
Social class is dead. Education is the political dividing line that matters. This has been apparent since (at least) the 2016 EU referendum, although it has not been recognised by enough people who do and write about politics. The results of this week’s elections should drive the point home. According to early analysis of polling
She handed the vaccine procurement process over to the European Union. She didn’t invest much in new production. And she allowed an American multinational to take control of a brilliant discovery by a small German biotech company. Angela Merkel, the out-going German Chancellor, has not had much success battling the Covid-19 crisis, and her handling
Oh dear. Labour’s loss of Hartlepool on a 16 point swing to the Tories has not gone down well with Keir Starmer’s most vocal critics. Lloyd Russell-Moyle was first out of the blocks this morning, tweeting shortly after midnight that ‘Good to see valueless flag waving and suit wearing working so well… or not?’ Fellow
How well has the EU dealt with the pandemic? According to Ursula von der Leyen, the bloc’s performance has been world beating. In an address yesterday, the Commission president lauded her own performance while claiming that the EU had proven its detractors wrong. During her so-called ‘state of the union’, she said: We all heard the
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The local election results are coming in over the weekend, but the bombshell came early with Hartlepool going to the tories in a massive 16-point swing. Isabel Hardman speaks to James Forsyth and Katy Balls about how much the red wall has left to give.
There are two popular reactions to the Hartlepool by-election, which one you favour depending largely on your political tribe. The first holds that the white working class has reacted against a woke, metropolitan Labour party and its knee-taking leader, Keir Starmer. The second holds that the town’s racist and xenophobic population are still fearful that
So the Conservatives have won the ‘pools, as we used to say of jackpot winners before the advent of the National Lottery. The Hartlepool constituency, known before 1974 as ‘the Hartlepools’ in recognition of the distinct settlements of old Hartlepool and West Hartlepool, has just secured its place in British political folk lore. It isn’t just
The Tory victory in Hartlepool, with a swing of 16 per cent and the biggest increase in a governing party’s vote in any by-election since 1945, is a terrible blow to Labour hopes that the choice of Sir Keir Starmer would soon stem their rot. What happened in what was a safe Labour seat —
Keir Starmer is facing a rocky few days as the party’s results from the local elections start to come in. Labour has lost Hartlepool with the Tories taking the seat with a majority of 6,940. While many Labour campaigners were braced for defeat, the margin by which the Conservatives have won has taken both pollsters
This morning Labour are in damage limitation mode after the party’s candidate in the Hartlepool by election conceded defeat. However, not everyone has got the memo. Step forward Lloyd Russell-Moyle, the onetime shadow minister for natural environment and air quality who quit Starmer’s frontbench in July last year. The Brighton left-winger did not even wait
The Tories have taken Hartlepool on a remarkable 16 per cent swing from Labour. The Tories saw the biggest increase — 23 per cent — in a governing party’s share of the vote in a by-election in the post-war era. Labour has been trounced in a seat that has been theirs since its creation in
Labour has started bracing itself for a very unpleasant few days of results in elections across the country. As polls close in local, mayoral, devolved assembly and police and crime commissioner elections, as well as the Hartlepool by-election, a party source has said: These were always going to be tough elections for Labour. Keir has
